Metafunctional Shifts in the Translation of Student and Professional Translators

Abstract

The involvement of linguistics theories in translation studies in the recent years that becomes more and more obvious since they can replace the intuition of the translator to solve their translation problem provides an opportunity to explore the best translation practice. One of linguistics theories concerning with the translation practice is systemic functional linguistics (SFL) which views grammar as a resource for making meaning. This research focused on analyzing the translation product using an SFL metafunction theory involving student and professional translators. In particular, this research aimed at finding out how the student translators and professional translators shift transitivity, mood, and theme elements in the translation process. This research was a qualitative research using a content analysis method. The participants of this research were 5 student translators and 5 professional translators who were asked to translate two history texts composing of around 240-word long from English into Bahasa Indonesia. The readability of the source texts was measured with the help of SMOG readability formula. The data were collected using Translog and retrospective questionnaire. Based on the data analysis, it was found that (i) the professional translators did metafunctional shifts more frequently than did the student translators; and (ii) the shifts done by the professional translators paid attention to how the meaning is kept (inter-strata shifts), while the student translators concerned with the form of the shifts (intra-strata shifts).